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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

Well, I know nothing about Mouser's home appliance repair skills... which is too bad it seems, as it sounds like an entertaining subject.

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

Maybe I should focus on adding whatever i need to add to farr to allow a plugin to seamlessly take over file system searching, and then let others write specific plugins for Everything, Locate, Windows Desktop Search, that will do the actual work.

+ 1 from me for that idea.

This is mainly because I can't really see any need to rewrite/duplicate whatever other already perfectly good search/indexing engines that people may have available and are likely to be using. For example, having turned off GDS, I now use the Win7-64 indexing for pretty much everything - it is very efficient, and effective. Keeping potential system overhead/duplication down to a minimum is probably an advisable approach.

Funny, I would have agreed with "don't duplicate effort" a year or two ago, but now that Everything - my favorite instant search app - has been so slow to update for so long, seeming nearly abandoned, and so many other similar apps are being cancelled, abandoned, etc. (Google Desktop, Yahoo Desktop, etc.), I'm actually in favor of having a reliable dev whom I know (mouser) tackle this problem and keep the app updated! With the popularity of Everything, if FARR could match it for speed and features in terms of file search, while also having all its other capabilities, well it'd be a pretty "killer app" and I think such a feature would actually help drive FARR adoption quite a lot. People might start just for the quick file indexing and search, that's the first taste of the drug that is FARR, but over time they could realize how much more it can do and it'd become indispensable. All that is to say that I think a lightning quick full hard drive indexed search tool is more universally appealing than a type-to-launch app like FARR is.

As for Windows Search/Indexing, my god I've never found it to be anything but appallingly slow, inefficient, and just plain incapable of finding my files. I mean shockingly so. This started with Windows Vista (XP's file search wasn't great, but at least it found all files). Vista file searches suddenly weren't turning up files I *knew* were there! Very strange. I had hoped Win7 would fix it but it didn't. So now I just use Everything and XYPlorer (which I won a license for on DC many moons ago!).

I am with JJ on this one. I have been of the mindset that a core indexing option should be developed that is INTEGRATED into FARR or developed as a plugin and maintained by mouser. The issue with plugins by 3rd parties is that if the developer loses interest, functionality will inevitably break and the users will be out that functionality. But as long as mouser continues to develop and maintain FARR, we can expect indexing to continue to work. This is part of the reason I would prefer to not see reliance on a 3rd party program but instead see this functionality built into FARR or implemented as a core plugin to FARR, so those who do not want it can do without it.

For some reason I think there is particularly high turnover in the search/indexing market too, perhaps because it was a "hot topic" a few years back so a bunch of seemingly unrelated companies (Yahoo, Google) as well as many individual coders jumped into the fray, and now we're seeing things settle down to just a few providers. Still somehow the best of them (Everything) isn't nearly as well supported as I'd like it to be. Maybe the market for those tools just isn't what I thought it was, but I sure do love Everything - more, I will admit, than FARR, though I love FARR too. I'd almost like Everything-esque functionality in FARAR (and yes I know there are FARR plugins to integrate EV) to get me to use FARR more.

However... Relying on a 3rd party could mean have an indexing option rapidly with minimal efforts on mouser's part. And if the 3rd party options doen't get updated/don't work after a while (a couple years?), mouser can then develop his own indexing mechanism...

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

In any case... Whatever the kind of indexing, I hope it can work with various languages/character sets (i.e. : Unicode) and not just English...

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

But right now, there is some support for accentuated chars. I hope it won't be less than that. (E.g. : The Everything plugin, for some reasons doesn't allow me to run/open any file with accentuated chars -- Everything as such doesn't have that problem.)

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

However... Relying on a 3rd party could mean have an indexing option rapidly with minimal efforts on mouser's part. And if the 3rd party options doen't get updated/don't work after a while (a couple years?), mouser can then develop his own indexing mechanism...

Yes, + 1 from me - absolutely re the issue of the longevity/turnover of SI (Search/Indexing) tools in the market.

It has been a source of frustration to me that some perfectly good SI tools have been introduced into the market and then ongoing development/support gradually ceased without any real explanation as to why that happened. They fall into a class of software that has been termed "abandonware".

Two SI abandonware tools that occur to me are ADS (AltaVista Desktop Search) and GDS. From what @JavaJones and/or @Josh write, maybe Everything is about to join that class too?

I started using the GDS √ü and stuck with it during all its problems and until it became rather good. I was a bit miffed when Google informed us recently that they were going to abandon GDS, but I accepted the fact and de-installed the tool. However, when I was upgrading to Win7-64, I thought I'd give the inbuilt SI - i.e., WS (Windows Search) - a whirl and so turned on indexing for my main hard drive. It took a while for WS to build its index in the background, but once it had done that it seemed to pose no real system overhead or annoyance that I could detect - which seemed to be very different to my experience of the horror of the built-in Win XP SI.(I sometimes wonder what difference - if any - having the new 7200rpm hard drive may have made, as opposed to having the old 5200rpm one.)

I do not easily praise Microsoft, and so, having played about with WS a fair bit by now, I think they deserve praise. I discovered that WS seems to be almost "too" good (better than GDS) - it will search everything, including stuff you may never need. After I spent some time tuning it (GDS was never able to be so easily fine-tuned), it seemed to be able to perform faultlessly. Furthermore, Microsoft has been consistent and persisted with improving its inbuilt OS SI and integrating it with its own products (e.g., Outlook, OneNote) and ensuring that it can look into common third-party archive file formats (e.g., .ZIP).

What I miss though is the ability that GDS gave to index across Gmail and also documents/files on your other PCs, giving you an index for nearly all your disparate files/data. That was something potentially very useful.

So what?Well, experience/history would seem to indicate that desktop indexing/search providers have been able to produce some excellent stuff, but they seem to be relatively "impermanent" and cannot be relied upon indefinitely. (I don't understand why this might be.)Thus, putting an interface or plugin to FARR to use your index/search tool of choice is a useful way of accommodating that as a fact of life.If FARR were to have its own built-in SI tool, then that would arguably be re-inventing the wheel as far as WS goes - which is apparently a perfectly good wheel, so why bother to expend time/effort in developing and supporting a good third-party imitation?

Just my opinions/needs here:

Personally, I don't want/need to run two SI tools simultaneously whilst one of them gets out of √ü and up to speed either. It would probably be an unnecessary/avoidable system overhead, though possibly of academic interest. (I would be interested in it, at any rate.)

I don't see the need to inadvertently or otherwise turn FARR into some kind of self-contained comprehensive GUI for the OS either. The OS already has one. FARR (and a lot of its plugins) seems to fit as a superb niche player, making up for the deficiencies/inefficiencies of that OS GUI. Windows' IS (WS) does not seem to be one of those deficiencies/inefficiencies.

If FARR could somehow replace that ability that GDS gave (to index across Gmail and also documents/files on your other PCs, giving you an index for nearly all your disparate files/data), then I could be seriously interested. (That would be heading towards PIM nirvana for me.)

However... Relying on a 3rd party could mean have an indexing option rapidly with minimal efforts on mouser's part. And if the 3rd party options doen't get updated/don't work after a while (a couple years?), mouser can then develop his own indexing mechanism...

Isn't that exactly what happened with the Everything plugin?

- Oshyan

Not sure what you're referring to... but IMO : No... as the current "integration" with Everything hasn't been worked on by mouser but by some other developper who -- while doing a great job -- is not the main FARR coder... And might not be able to / have the incentive to work on these little details.

Otherwise, if you're referring to Everything relative abandonment... Maybe, but it seems already perfectly usable as an indexer as it is. And in any case, Everything is not the only solution out there.

[EDIT] That said, in an ideal world, I'm all for an indexer purely developed by mouser. It's just that, given the choice, for similar performance and functionality... a) in 2 weeks b) or in a year... I'd choose the first option.

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

I'd be very surprised if windows search got worse and not better... or if it even got abandoned. It's one very important function of windows 7.

[EDIT : just fully read IanB's post. I pretty much agree...]

« Last Edit: November 12, 2011, 09:41:45 PM by Armando »

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

Hi Phitsc - I like the integration with farr. I think the focus should be put on that.

My only gripe is that it still crashes farr too often in my specific case (using XP sp3). I know I'm not the majority (and for those without any stability problems, I wonder why they don't use it... It's SUPER FAST). If only I knew what did it (the problem), I'd use it much more. More than "Everything" as I don't have the accentuated chars problem with Windows Search...

In any case I'll go to the other thread as this one is dedicated to farr's index.

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

My only gripe is that it still crashes farr too often in my specific case (using XP sp3). I know I'm not the majority (and for those without any stability problems, I wonder why they don't use it... It's SUPER FAST). If only I knew what did it (the problem), I'd use it much more. More than "Everything" as I don't have the accentuated chars problem with Windows Search...

Not good I'll try using it more often in the coming days, in order to try to reproduce a crash.

Strange, my experiences with Windows Search have been consistently awful, ever since Vista and including Win7. Maybe I should give it another try, but it's hard to trust it after blatantly missing files I was clearly and easily able to find with other tools (and simple folder browsing).

Everything is certainly not the only indexer/search option, it's just the best and fastest, in my experience (by far). As for its status, sure it's a good indexer already, so what more needs to be done, right? Well, how about icons/thumbnails for file types, for example? On the developer's list, I know that much, but after a year of no updates, well one starts to wonder if anything more will ever happen. How important is it? Not terribly, I guess, but future OS or file system upgrades may break it, for example. It's a real bummer when you come to rely deeply on a tool - and Everything is exactly the kind of tool that gets deep into your regular computer experience - and then it goes away. Hard to adjust.

Strange, my experiences with Windows Search have been consistently awful, ever since Vista and including Win7. Maybe I should give it another try, but it's hard to trust it after blatantly missing files I was clearly and easily able to find with other tools (and simple folder browsing).

Everything is certainly not the only indexer/search option, it's just the best and fastest, in my experience (by far). As for its status, sure it's a good indexer already, so what more needs to be done, right? Well, how about icons/thumbnails for file types, for example? On the developer's list, I know that much, but after a year of no updates, well one starts to wonder if anything more will ever happen. How important is it? Not terribly, I guess, but future OS or file system upgrades may break it, for example. It's a real bummer when you come to rely deeply on a tool - and Everything is exactly the kind of tool that gets deep into your regular computer experience - and then it goes away. Hard to adjust.

- Oshyan

Don't know what the problem could be with windows search. I haven't thoroughly tested it [Edit: well, I did, but not recently], but it seems reliable here. Note that i use it only to 1- index file names and properties, 2- fully index Outlook's PST.

Usually what happens with Windows Search is that (at least on XP) some folders/file have the file indexing feature specifically disabled. To change that you have to basically deselect the "Allow Indexing Service to Index this disk for fast file searching" in the drive's/folder's property, Cancel the deselection process when it starts, and then reselect it and let it do its job. That solved the unreachable files problems on my side, a while ago.

But maybe you've tried all that already, and the problem is elsewhere.

As far as everything goes... Well, I haven't said it is "the" solution. And I agree with the all the points you make. But would farr need all those everything features, or would it need only its indexing capabilities ? (BTW, here I get icons with the everything plugin for farr, but maybe I misunderstood what you're saying.)

« Last Edit: November 19, 2011, 05:13:21 PM by Armando »

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould

In this thread, Google Desktop Search is an example, and so (apparently) might Everything be.

AFAIK Google do have a three years "deprecation period" for their "out of the lab" products. And those 3 years aren't set in stone and could transform into more years, depending on the APIs popularity. That said, it wouldn't be a smart move to start using GDS now that it's been discontinued, but for those using it, it's not "dead" per se. It's just... dying.

In any case, I never liked Google Desktop search... In my extensive personal tests (while I was doing research for my PhD.), GDS missed a lot of content. The only desktop search software that didn't miss a thing was Archivarius. So I use Archivarius for content indexing (except for Outlook, which it indexes much too slowly for my taste) & windows search/everything for all file names and Outlook indexing. (Archivarius is far from being as user friendly as the other Desktop search software out there, and it doesn't index in real time -- you need to set it on a schedule... But it works well and is reliable -- and that was my main priority.)

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"I suppose it can be said that I'm an absent-minded driver. It's true that I've driven through a number of red lights on occasion, but on the other hand, I've stopped at a lot of green ones but never gotten credit for it."Glenn Gould